I like reading but it is EXHAUSTING

I have known that I have complete aphantasia for a couple of years now, but it doesn’t bother me so most of the time I forget about aphantasia. But recently I was wondering why I always felt like reading was difficult for me.

When I was a kid, I always felt like I was bad at reading, and my 5^th grade English teacher even pulled me aside to do personal readings with me because she felt I needed the extra help. Now as an adult, I still feel like I am slow at reading, I often don’t remember much of what I read, I often have to re-read passages, and reading is extremely exhausting for me. Reading can be so exhausting for me that I considered that I might have dyslexia. I got tested for dyslexia, and it turns out that I do not have it. My ability to read, understand text, and manipulate sounds were all too good to be diagnosed with dyslexia.

While I was getting tested for dyslexia, I was given an IQ test. My IQ is slightly above average, but the thing that really shocked me was that my working memory is FAR above average. I now suspect that the reason I find reading difficult is because I rely mostly on verbal working memory to make sense of text that was probably written for more visual thinkers.

To be clear, I am mostly referring to fiction books. My ability to read goes up when I am reading news articles, which I suspect is because news articles don’t require much working memory to read. I read some experiences from other aphantasia people who said they skim over many details such as descriptions of things, but I actually don’t do that. I just store the details as facts which probably requires a lot of memory and is probably why I find reading so exhausting.

Don’t take my post to mean that I don’t like reading. I do like reading; I just find it exhausting. It’s like mental exercise. A lot of posts talk about how people with aphantasia experience reading differently but none of them talk about if it is actually exhausting to read material that was designed for visual thinkers. So, I wanted to ask my fellow aphants, do you guys find reading fiction to be exhausting? Do you find yourself reading some parts pretty slowly or re-reading many passages? Do you feel like your working memory is in overdrive when you are reading? If you can’t visualize the story, what mental faculties do you use to make sense of the text?

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I like reading but it is EXHAUSTING

2 min readByAlex Thielemier

Learning

Thanks for reading this.

I like reading but it is EXHAUSTING

2 min readByAlex Thielemier

Learning

Thanks for reading this.

I like reading but it is EXHAUSTING

2 min readByAlex Thielemier

Learning

Thanks for reading this.

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Kathleen McGrath•recently•edited

I struggle intensely with reading. I always attributed it to my inablity to cross my eyes, which makes tracking works challening. Now it makes even. more sense due to my total aphantasia! Books that are heavy with descriptions are the bane of my very existence! I do better with dialog. I generally prefer audio books as a result. Side note, I always laugh when people read a book and then get angry with the way characters look in the movie versions. I never imagined how they would look, so it never bothers me!!!

Neal White•recently•edited

Good question. I find reading to be fairly effortless, but it wasn't always that way. I am dyslexic and am at the extreme low end of aphantasia. (I seen nothing but blackness when I close my eyes.) Until about 4th or 5th grade, I hated reading (which was a struggle), but my mom (an English teacher) kept working with me until something clicked. By 6th grade I was reading at a senior high school level. Certainly, if I'm tired, I do find myself re-reading paragraphs or pages. That's when I put the book down. Mentally, it's like everything else I remember: I seem to store the story as a set of linked facts. Associated words, basically. That sounds a lot like your situation, but it's not an effort for me.